The mid-sixteenth-century Scottish reformation made the achievement of national harmony even more elusive because it opened new fault lines among the nobility. On her return from France in 1560, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots was confronted by an aristocracy that in large part detested her religion and had become accustomed to doing as it pleased. Aristocrats were also getting richer, for the extensive lands of the Scottish Church were gradually being annexed by the nobility and gentry. Irrespective of the depth of their theological convictions, a substantial body of landowners now had a vested interest in upholding Presbyterianism. Some were happy to make common cause with Elizabeth I, whose ministers were nervous about the presence of a French-sponsored Catholic monarch on England’s northern frontier.
Mary Queen of Scots marital miscalculations added immeasurably to her problems, and she was finally forced by an aristocratic coalition to escape to England in 1568. For the next nineteen years there was another regency, during which a section of the nobility followed their instincts. An English intelligence analysis of 1577 revealed a selfish and fractious peerage. The Earl of Caithness ‘follows his own profit, making always fair weather with those in authority’, whom he bribed. Despite being a peer of ‘no substance’, Lord Forbes was pursuing a ‘deadly feud’ with the Gordons. The MacDonald Lord of the Isles was fickle, disobedient and often ordered raids on the mainland, which was to be expected from a man whose ancestors had made private alliances with the English Crown whenever it suited them. It was noted that quarrelsome lords were backed by gentlemen of ‘their surname’, that is networks of kinsmen. In 1583 another intelligence assessment concluded that the nobility and knights were the ‘greatest force now in [the] Kingdom’ and marvelled at the ‘insolence’ of the Borderers and Highlanders.12 James Melville, a Presbyterian divine, despaired of the Scottish nobility, castigating them for their indifference to the nation’s welfare.
Between 1573 and 1625 there were 365 recorded feuds between landowning families in Scotland.13 They involved assassinations, the vengeful mutilation of corpses, sieges, skirmishes and, in the case of the feud between the Earls of Moray and the Earls (later Marquesses) of Huntly, pitched battles between armies of hundreds. The participants were not disloyal, rather they passionately believed that their ancestral code of honour was superior to the laws made by Parliament. Legislation framed to extend the civic peace and encourage commerce was utterly alien to the spirit of the tribal, Gaelic world of the Highlands with its culture of feasting, cattle rustling and clan feuds.
James VI was determined to erode and finally destroy a culture which he believed was a brake on his kingdom’s progress. To transform it into a prosperous and peaceful state he needed a passive and cooperative nobility that had relinquished its old habits and the codes which gave legitimacy to violence. Tamed in spirit, the Scottish aristocracy would use its traditional authority to impose civility on its kinsmen, servants and clansmen. The royal project was endorsed by the Kirk, which needed the nobility and gentry to enforce religious and social discipline, and lawyers. There was support too from a section of aristocracy that shared James’s vision and recognised the damage inflicted on the nation by its headstrong colleagues.
The royal civilising mission was a slow, uphill task. There was the carrot of royal patronage for lords who cooperated and the stick of armed coercion for those who did not. It fell heavily on the Earls of Huntly and Erroll in a string of campaigns waged between 1589 and 1595, and on the intransigent MacGregors, MacLeods, MacIains and MacDonalds in the western Highlands, whose lands were harried by royal forces. An iron fist remorselessly applied would teach the clansmen to fear the King more than the chiefs who had failed to protect them from his displeasure.
The bruised clans submitted to new laws contrived to crush their culture. The 1609 Statutes of Iona enlisted chieftains as the gendarmes of civilisation by compelling them to enforce laws made by Parliament where Lowland influence predominated. The statutes were intended to defuse the clans by banning those features of their culture which fostered violence. Chieftains had to ration the amount of whisky drunk at their feastings, prune their personal retinues and punish clansmen who wandered the countryside extorting food and drink from anyone they encountered. A prohibition was placed on giving hospitality to performers whose ballads and verses glorified and perpetuated the bloodthirsty culture of clan feuds. James also put pressure on the chieftains to send their sons to Lowland academies, where they would acquire the polish and learning which distinguished the Renaissance gentleman.
Better still, young bloods could be encouraged to undertake the Grand Tour and absorb at first-hand the manners, tastes and sophistication of the Continental nobility. Fencing classes, dancing lessons, visiting foreign courts and inspecting Roman ruins did not quite do the trick. Gaelic machismo was not easily neutered, and in 1633, when Charles I contemplated legislation to restore some of the purloined Church lands, the Scottish aristocracy was outraged. To protect their purses (and their honour) one group of peers considered dirking the royal representative ‘in the old Scottish manner’, a blind nobleman asking his colleagues to help guide his dagger to its target.14 The taming of the Scottish nobility had been partial, but the process was accelerated after 1603 when England and Scotland became a dual monarchy. A steady stream of Scottish peers followed James VI southwards to London where they soon became addicted to the indulgences of competitive consumption.
7
Obeyed and Looked
Up To: The Tudors
and Their Lords
When James VI and his peers rode to London in 1603 they were astonished by the scale and ostentation of the houses of the English nobility. In Scotland the endemic political turbulence of the past fifty years had compelled magnates to live in castles for their own safety, but in England these had either fallen into disuse, or had been adapted to satisfy the prevailing fashion for light-filled rooms and galleries. Owners of new houses regarded them as jewels whose settings were knot gardens, mazes, topiary and landscaped grounds. These artificial Arcadias were ‘fair and good to the eye’, and proof that the lords of the soil were also masters of nature.1 The Elizabethan grand houses with their furniture and ornaments were expressions of the visual culture of ‘magnificence’ which had entranced the aristocratic imagination for the past hundred years. Cultivating and paying for magnificence required a flourishing agriculture and domestic peace.
The sixteenth century had been a period of comparative stability. There were some unnerving wobbles between 1547 and 1558 when the minority of Edward VI and the reign of a woman, Mary I, were treated as a power vacuum by a handful of ambitious and reckless peers. The politics of the sword reappeared. In 1549 Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Protector of the twelve-year-old King was overthrown by John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, at the head of thousands of his retainers and allies. Revealingly, Somerset feared a repeat of the 1483 coup and predicted the King’s deposition.2 Nothing was further from Warwick’s mind: he planned to make the King his creature, propel the Dudleys to the forefront of the aristocracy (he made himself Duke of Northumberland) and direct England towards a Calvinist brand of Protestantism. Success depended on Edward’s eventual succession, but at the close of 1552 the hitherto robust prince contracted tuberculosis. A frantic Northumberland induced the dying king to make a will by which he bequeathed his crown to Lady Jane Grey, the Duke’s daughter-in-law and a pliant young gentlewoman.
This was illegal and, as in 1483, the nobility was shocked by one of its kind tampering with the laws of succession and inheritance. Mary Tudor was Edward’s lawful heir, of this there was no doubt beyond Northumberland’s greedy circle. She was then living in Norfolk, where she had been given the forfeited Howard estates (seized in 1546 by Henry VIII) and with them, the family’s network of dependents. They formed the core of her forces which converged on London, where Northumberland’s fellow councillors were preparing to welcome them. Paralysed by the scale of the opposition, the Duke dithered and then capit
ulated.
Within a year, the politics of violence were revived again, this time to force Queen Mary to forgo her proposed marriage to Philip I of Spain, which, it was feared, would reduce England to the status of an outlying province of the Habsburg empire. Rebel forces under Sir Thomas Wyatt entered London and were repulsed only after heavy fighting in which the retinues of loyal peers tipped the balance. The Queen had survived, but not long after a Spanish observer remarked that her nobles were more ‘obeyed and looked up to’ than her.
Actual aristocratic military power was less formidable than recent events had suggested, largely because many of their followers were lukewarm or wanted no part in highly risky power games. This nervousness was sensed by Lord Thomas Seymour, the Protector’s headstrong and swaggering younger brother who in 1547 advised Henry Grey, the Marquess of Dorset (the father of Lady Jane), to enlarge his retinue. The gentry, Seymour thought, would prove irresolute and so Dorset’s best bet lay with tempting ‘superior yeomen’ who were easily flattered by gifts of wine, venison pasties and the attentions of a marquess.3 Seymour was proved correct when Northumberland’s followers refused to hazard their lives for ‘Queen’ Jane.4 In 1554 when Dorset, now Duke of Suffolk, joined Wyatt’s rebels, his frightened servants deserted him. Afterwards, one explained that although the Duke had been ‘a good lord to them’, they refused to become accomplices to treason.5 On the other side, Lord Cobham complained that his servants and the ‘commons’ he had enlisted to resist Wyatt mutinied when the rebel artillery bombarded his castle at Cobham in Kent.6
Prevarication and backsliding were understandable, as they had been during the Wars of the Roses. Allegiance to a lord did not strip a man of his common sense, or make him careless of his life. Rebels lost their lands and lives; titled traitors were beheaded; commoners were hung, castrated, drawn and quartered. Moreover, in the mid-sixteenth century fears of civil war were more intense than ever, for there were excellent reasons to believe that it would resolve into a contest between Catholics and Protestants. Worse still, Continental experience indicated that religious wars stimulated social conflict. During the summer of 1549 it seemed briefly possible that the destructive German peasant uprisings of the 1520s might be repeated in England. The popular insurrections in East Anglia and the western counties in 1549 were a powerful inducement for all landowners to show unity. One of the charges against Protector Somerset had been his open sympathy with the rebels’ economic grievances which had made him shrink from swift and condign measures against them.
A religious war of the kind then being waged in France between the Catholic and Protestant nobility seemed imminent in 1569. A cabal of Catholic peers hoped that a marriage between Mary Queen of Scots, then a fugitive in England, and Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, would simultaneously settle the succession (assuming the pair had a child) and reverse Elizabeth I’s Protestant settlement. Two of those peers, Thomas Percy, seventh Earl of Northumberland, and Charles Neville, sixth Earl of Westmorland, reached for their swords and mobilised their kinsmen, tenants and retainers in the hope that the royal council would cave in. However, it was unshaken by what turned out to be a shambling protest that collapsed with hardly a blow struck. Protestant clergymen harangued the royal levies on the sacred duty of obedience to a sovereign and loyal peers (including crypto-Catholics) raised thirty thousand men, an impressive show of solidarity with the Crown.7 Westmorland fled to Rome and exile, Northumberland was captured, tried and beheaded. Twenty years after, London theatregoers saw what the country had been spared when they watched Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris and Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy.
The pantomime of the Rising of the Northern Earls was the last serious attempt by the nobility to employ force to impose their political will on the Crown. The swansong of this tradition came in 1601 when Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, led a small band of impoverished peers on to the streets of London to bully Elizabeth I into giving them the favours they believed they deserved. It was more a riot of swaggerers led by a discarded favourite than a rebellion, and found few sympathisers. Essex was subsequently executed.
The Tudors could not govern without the goodwill and cooperation of the aristocracy, a political fact of life which they freely acknowledged and sometimes cursed. On the eve of his departure for the chivalric carnival of the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, Henry VIII ordered Henry, Lord Clifford, ‘to do us service in keeping the peace and good rule’ of northern England and spy on local sheriffs and justices.8 Clifford knew his duty: soon after he commanded a detachment against the Scots and held Skipton Castle against the insurgents during the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace. The King was thankful and made this model peer Earl of Cumberland. Henry also elevated those roaring boys with whom he drank, feasted and hunted and who embodied the spirit of muscular knighthood which animated him in his youth. Yet, on the whole, the Tudors were sparing in the creation and promotion of peers, Elizabeth I strikingly so. Royal restraint and natural wastage led to their numbers falling from fifty in 1500 to forty-four in 1603. Many of the new creations and promotions were of members of the royal secretariat like the Wriothesleys and Cecils, the men who painstakingly attended to the detail of everyday government.
Peers and everyone else now addressed the sovereign as ‘Your Majesty’, rather than ‘Your Grace’, which had been sufficient for Plantagenet vanity. The inflation of language reflected an inflation of status: ‘Majesty’ invested the Crown with a new aura and awesomeness and extended the distance between it and its most elevated subjects. Just before Henry VIII’s accession in 1509, huge statues of the kings of England from William I to Edward IV were set on the screen which separated the nave from the chancel in York Minster. Their size and prominence gave these princes parity with prophets and saints and pointed towards theories which stressed the sanctified nature of kingship. At the same time, the English monarchy assumed new political pretensions: Henry V was portrayed on his tomb in Westminster Abbey wearing an imperial crown, which was adopted by Henry VII on his coinage. The inference was clear: the English king had no earthly superior and, as Henry VIII declared when he took control of the Church in 1534, England was an ‘Empire’. The eventual outcome of this apotheosis of monarchy was the notion of the Divine Right of Kings, which insisted that the authority given by God to kings and queens exempted them from their subjects’ restraint or censure.
There was a political dimension to this nascent cult of sacred kingship. Between 1529 and 1536 Henry VIII constructed his own national Church with himself at its head and repudiated the spiritual authority of the Pope. Henceforward, the Crown through Parliament decided the faith of the nation and religious dissent became disloyalty. It was a revolution from above and, publicly at least, the aristocracy was content to comply with the King’s wishes, although in private many peers remained attached to old doctrines. Allegiance triumphed over private conscience; but protest was treason and so fear buttoned many lips. In 1536 a jittery Viscount Lisle implored Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to scotch rumours that he was a covert papist.9 In the same year, the nobility of the Midlands and North obeyed royal orders to mobilise its retinues and suppress the Pilgrimage of Grace, a mass popular protest against Henry’s religious policies. The fifth Earl of Shrewsbury raised nearly four thousand men.10 One peer, Thomas, Lord Darcy, joined the rebels and was the only aristocratic martyr. There were, however, plenty of humbler people glad to die for dogma, Catholic and Protestant.
Nobles of both faiths flocked to stake claims on the confiscated Church estates, which Henry first put on the market in 1540 to fund his French and Scottish wars. Within fourteen years the Crown had raised over a million pounds in what was the largest transfer of land since the Norman Conquest. Investors were able to secure a good return and closed ranks in Parliament in 1554 to block Mary I’s attempts to recover some of the former Church lands. Self-interest overrode devotional preferences, and at least one of the landowners who had helped the Queen to her throne accepted Church
estates as his reward.
Between 1559 and 1560 Parliament established Protestantism as the national religion and Elizabeth I as ‘supreme governor’ of the Church of England. Her pretensions and the doctrines of her Church were vindicated in 1588 with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which patriots interpreted as a victory over the Pope. Elizabeth was acclaimed as the embodiment of the spirit of a godly, united nation and courtier poets flattered her as the moon goddess Cynthia, or Diana the virgin huntress.
The ground had been well prepared for the cult of the Goddess Queen. Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor, which appeared in 1531 dedicated to Henry VIII, a popular guide to politics and morals written for the nobility and gentry, described the monarch as a sun, a source of life and illumination for all his subjects. The luminary prince gave lustre to his nobles and his ‘countenance, language and gesture’ conveyed a truly godlike dignity. To these qualities Elizabeth I added a feminine mystique. For the lords who attended on her, she was the aloof and unattainable lady of courtly love romances who was adored from afar. One of those under the royal spell, Sir Philip Sidney, gave her a present of a jewelled whip as a token of his submission to her will.
The Crown occupied the summit of the social hierarchy and was also its principal mainstay, as Elizabeth I had explained to the young Sir Philip. The youth had responded brusquely to an insult delivered by Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, during a tennis match. The Queen was appalled and lectured Sidney on ‘the respect inferiors owed to their superiors and the necessity in Princes to maintain their creations [i.e. the peerage], as degrees descending between the people’s licentiousness and the anointed sovereignty of Crowns. A gentleman’s neglect on the Nobility taught the peasant to insult them both.’11 Minus the contentious reference to the divine source of royal power, the Queen’s words echoed the sentiments later expressed by Ulysses in his famous justification of degree in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.
Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britain's Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present Page 9
